Color Scheme: An Irreverent History of Art and Pop Culture in Color Palettes

By Edith Young and Zachary Fine

Change the way you see color forever in this dazzling collection of color palettes spanning across art history and pop culture, and told in writer and photographer Edith Young's accessible, inviting style.

From the shades of pink in the blush of Madame de Pompadour's cheeks to Prince's concert costumes, Color Scheme decodes the often overlooked color concepts that can be found in art history and visual culture. Edith Young's forty color palettes and accompanying essays reveal the systems of color that underpin everything we see, allowing original and at times, even humorous, themes to emerge. Color Scheme is the perfect book for anyone interested in learning more about, or rethinking, how we see the world around us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
• Release date: Oct 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781648960819

Book preview

For my brother William,

and in memory of Clark Perkins,

two people I’ve been lucky to share

a museum bench with.

Contents

Foreword, Zachary Fine

Introduction

The reds of the red caps in Renaissance portraits, 1460–1535

The Artist’s Palette

The blush of Madame de Pompadour’s cheeks, 1746–63

ART HISTORY

The Art History Detective

The dresses worn by Velázquez’s infantas

Frans Hals’s ruff collars

Palettes

The pupils of the eyes in Vermeer’s portraits, 1656–72

Caravaggio’s Boy with a Basket of Fruit, 1593

The yellow bills in John James Audubon’s The Birds of America, 1827–38

The blue bills in John James Audubon’s The Birds of America, 1827–38

The roseate bills in John James Audubon’s The Birds of America, 1827–38

The blush of Marie Antoinette’s cheeks

Thanksgiving in America, 1825–2009

Seascapes, arranged along one horizon line

The mountaintops of the diorama paintings in the American Museum of Natural History

Helen Frankenthaler’s orange color fields

Charles Burchfield’s violets and violas

The stripes in Alice Neel’s portraits

The flesh tones of Lucian Freud’s ex-wives

Fairfield Porter’s skies

CONTEMPORARY ART

The Typologists

Palettes

The artist’s palette, from Anguissola to Botero

The blues of David Hockney’s pools

Botero’s beverages

The paint on Kerry James Marshall’s smocks

The greens of the garnishes in Wayne Thiebaud’s still lifes

Etel Adnan’s suns

John Currin’s blondes

The letter E in Mel Bochner’s paintings

POP CULTURE

The Color Strategy

Palettes

Tonya Harding’s figure skating costumes per competition

Prince’s concert outfits

Paul Thomas Anderson’s oeuvre

Craig Sager’s suits, in chronological order over the course of his sportscasting career

Walt Frazier’s suits, in chronological order over the course of his sportscasting career

Dennis Rodman’s hair dye, in chronological order over the course of his NBA career

Title cards from the second season of Saturday Night Live, 1976–77

How Pete Davidson dresses from the waist up on Weekend Update

Spike Lee’s eyeglasses, 1989–2020

CMYK VALUES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Foreword

Zachary Fine

I am submitting my bid to have Edith Young’s name added to the graying line of men in the history of color. The philosophers and scientists and dabblers—from Aristotle, Newton, and Goethe to Albers—have told us a great deal about what color is, how it is seen, and how it works. Young’s contribution is different.

Color Scheme is a visually dazzling book that not only brings colors together from different places and epochs but subtly rewires our sense of sight. We are in the habit of seeing color as a kind of ornamental cloak: we adorn ourselves in blues and greens, mistakenly paint our houses in mauve, and repaint them again in beige, the fashions changing, our moods and preferences shifting. But our perception of color is affected by objects as much as our perception of objects is affected by color—it’s not just a red apple but also an apple’d red. There is no color without a material substrate: a daub of gouache, a pixel, a particle. The genius of Color Scheme is that it gives color back its form, restoring time and place to the floating words—red, yellow, blue—and supplying them with history and humor.

We can find the isolated detail here changing color-wise across an artist’s work (the dresses of Diego Velázquez’s infantas, the flesh tones of Lucian Freud’s ex-wives, the ruff collars in Frans Hals), or the variations of a color across the same item in different paintings (the reds in Renaissance caps). We can see a single thing shifting in time (Dennis Rodman’s hair color morphing through the Chicago Bulls’ ’96 playoff run) or have a single thing compressed (Caravaggio’s Boy with a Basket of Fruit in twelve colored tiles).

For André Malraux, the magic of photography was that it could bring the world of art near—Chartres Cathedral on the page, shoulder-to-shoulder with Donatello’s David and the Taj Mahal. Color Scheme imagines something similar for color. Everything distilled into its most vibrant aspect, collected and arranged. Hidden affinities throughout history, a whole system of correspondence undergirding the visible world.

Through the filter of Young’s palettes, everything looks different to me now. When I pour my coffee in the morning, I am transfixed by the blue of the mug. It is suddenly more than a mug. It is a portal to a larger system of mugs. On its surface, I see the rhubarb-colored mug I bought in college, the mint-colored mug my father was partial to for many months, the lowly and graying white mug from an old diner. I see the contents of my visual life arrayed before me according to color, and it’s as if I’ve entered the world at a secret angle.

Introduction

While a student at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), I went to the Cable Car Cinema in Providence one evening and saw the 2011 documentary Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel . The film, which orbits around Vreeland’s career as a magazine editor and later as the special consultant to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, recalls a grandiose passage from D.V ., Vreeland’s 1984 autobiography: "All my life I’ve pursued the perfect red. I can never get painters to mix it for me. It’s exactly as if I’d said, ‘I want Rococo with a spot of Gothic in it and a bit of Buddhist temple’—they have no idea what I’m talking about. About the best red is to copy the color of a child’s cap in any Renaissance portrait." ¹

Sitting in the dark theater, I was struck by Vreeland’s idea of perfection in color. Her statement was inexact and somewhat ludicrous, though somehow charming and true, all at once. I immediately had a sense of how the idea could be both debunked and reinforced, and how this would take its visual shape in the form of a color palette, riffing off of the paint chips one might peruse at Benjamin Moore or Farrow & Ball. And so the reds of the red caps in Renaissance portraits became the first palette in this series.

From that first print, the series has expanded in its scope. While these palettes can be enjoyed for the colors alone, the ongoing research project is committed to showing viewers new ways of thinking about artists’ oeuvres and larger arcs in art history. Art and art history can be a bit intimidating, and I like creating an entry point that sets the tone with a sense of irreverence. At times, these typologies of color and text pinpoint revealing themes throughout artists’ careers or over time, secreting them into the viewer’s brain with the Trojan Horse of humor. Other times, the palettes present a bit of a puzzle, willing the viewer to decode the pattern they see before them. For the newly